LinkedIn has a lot of ‘splainin’ to do. LinkedIn has been breached and 6.5 million hashed and encrypted LinkedIn user passwords have been posted to a site with requests for help in cracking them.
If you have a LinkedIn account and haven’t done so already, go to LinkedIn and change your password now.
Let’s get something that The Next Web’s recent article, A Day in the Life of a Developer Evangelist, got completely wrong — and at the very start of the article, to boot:
In the past two years, the explosion in web technologies and apps has created a new profession: It’s called Developer Evangelism, and it’s seriously awesome.
The “seriously awesome” part is correct. The “two years” part is waaaay off. The title “developer evangelist” has been around since the 1980s when people at Apple first started using it. It was coined by Apple’s Mike Murray, the title was first held by Mike Boich and it was popularized by Guy Kawasaki. Since then, other people have taken up the title, most notably Robert Scoble, who was a tech evangelist at Microsoft in the early 2000s (Microsoft created a whole division in 2001 called Developer & Platform Evangelism, for which I worked from late 2008 through early 2011).
Christian Heilmann, developer evangelist at Mozilla.
In fact, I’m a developer evangelist who’ll soon be looking for his next gig. I’m on summer vacation at the moment, getting a much-needed vacation time in, but at the same time, I’m also learning a little iOS development. If you’d like to read more about what I think of my line of work, take a look at these articles:
And if you want to hear how I got into developer evangelism, watch this video of my presentation at CUSEC 2009:
I may be taking it (relatively) easy right now, but I’m keeping my eyes open. If you’re looking for the world’s only rock-and-roll accordion-playing tech evangelist, check out my resume or LinkedIn profile, then drop me a line!
How do top Android developers QA test their apps? There are so many different Android phones out there, many with different specs, screen resolutions and OS versions (see the pie chart above, showing the distribution of Android phones for users of Red Robot Labs’ apps) that’s it’s practically impossible to test your app on every device.
In this TechCrunch article, Kim-Mai Cutler talks to some Android developers — Red Robot Labs, Pocket Gems, Storm8 and Animoca — about how they deal. The first three use some variation on the 80/20 rule, testing on about 30 or 40 devices that are representative of the Android devices used by their target markets, while Animoca test on hundreds because much of their user base is in Asia, where there’s a plethora of cheap Android-based but not necessarily Android-certified mobile devices.
The article includes a slideshow and video from Pocket Gems’ Jeff DeCew and Arjun Dayal about how they deal with developing for such a wide array of Android devices, and I’ve included them below.
The seven deadly sins, as explained in the blog Indexed. Click the image to see the original.
The seven deadly sins of mobile app design. The article goes into more detail, but quickly listed, they are:
The Walmart Garden Smartphone. Jean-Louis Gassée sets up an interesting fiction that Walmart’s Silicon Valley-based Walmart Labs is creating an Android-based smartphone for Walmart in order to make Walmart “the Walmart of smartphones”. He says that the idea is ridiculous for a number of reasons, and for the same reasons, so are the rumours about Facebook making their own phone.
It’s an interesting thought experiment and a good argument, but I still think that it doesn’t completely invalidate the Facebook phone rumours. Walmart isn’t a an online platform while Facebook is, and that makes a pairing with a device specifically designed to access online platforms a more sensible idea.
New mobile devices! Among them:
Android 4.0, a.k.a. “Ice Cream Sandwich”, is now on slightly more than 7% of the Android devices out there. Android 2.3.3 is still the dominant version out there, accounting for about two-thirds of all Android devices, and its share is actually growing.
While Ice Cream Sandwich’s growth represents a doubling of share since early April, MG “ParisLemon” Siegler astutely notes that it took 7 months to hit the 7% mark. He also notes that the Google I/O conference, where they’re expected to announce the next version is coming soon, and:
Google will announce the next version of their OS before 10% of their users are on the last version. Think about how insane that is for a second.
Compare this to the growth rate of iOS 5, which surpassed a 20% adoption rate in 5 days by Chitika’s measure.
Higher Hanging Fruit: iMore’s list of features that iOS 6 could borrow from other mobile OSs. An interesting think piece on some great ideas already in other mobile operating systems that Apple could borrow for iOS 6, which will probably be covered at the upcoming WWDC.
Why is Todd Bishop struggling with Windows 8? Todd Bishop says it feels like a forced mashup between desktop and tablet. ComputerWorld has also expressed the same sentiment.
Maintenance and upkeep in action!
Maintaining an app is critical to its overall success. This argument argues that maintaining and upkeeping your apps is as important as their launch.
Click image above to download my resume (107KB PDF).
My summer vacation continues nicely, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have an eye out for my next opportunity. I’ve spent a little time fielding calls from recruiters and other interested parties while still enjoying my time off, marvelling at junk food, hitting flea markets and going to the beach.
I’ve been getting requests for my resume, and when that happens, I say “my LinkedIn profile is my resume”. As a living document within LinkedIn’s web application, it’s always up-to-date, easily found either via Google or LinkedIn’s own search feature and accessible anywhere and on any device that can view web pages. LinkedIn profiles have a reputation of being more honest than a paper resume; as public documents, it’s much harder to lie, exaggerate or otherwise “fudge” since it’s all too easy for people to call you out.
There are those who still would prefer a regular-format resume from me, so I’ve created one, and you can download it here (107KB PDF). It’s in PDF format, so it should look good no matter whether you’re viewing it on a computer, tablet or mobile phone or printing it out. It has the same content as my LinkedIn profile; I simply copied the text from my LinkedIn profile and pasted it into a resume document and then formatted it a little.
If you’re either wondering if I’m the right guy for your company or if you’re just plain curious, feel free to take a look at my resume.
The article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.
A most unfortunate headline. I found this via George Takei and CrackBerry.com. A source within RIM says these layoffs could happen as early as today.
Windows 8: An Android Killer? When I was a Windows Evangelist, I argued that Android should be the target, not the iPhone, because Android provided an opportunity to win over their users (who weren’t anywhere nearly as devoted to the brand as iPhone users were) as well as developers (since the development experience for Windows Phone was, in my opinion, far nicer than for Android). Stonewash’s Daniel Sharp is working with Windows 8 and has come to appreciate the Windows Phone developer experience, writing:
Working with Windows 8 is simple and enjoyable: we spend our time adding new features and improving performance. Working with Android is complicated and painful: we spend our time trying to make it work on the thousands of different variants, which is less than ideal and simplicity always wins.
LungoJS HTML5 Mobile Framework: its creators claim that it’s “the first Mobile Framework that uses the actual features of HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript.” I’ve given it only the most cursory of looks, but it seems interesting and I’ve bookmarked it for a closer look-see at a later time.
Chitika says that Apple has nearly two-thirds of mobile device usage in the U.S., ten times that of Samsung. Chitika is an advertising and analytics company, and their numbers come from metrics from sites on their network (details on their methodology are available here). You can see more of their numbers in their market share report for May 2012.
Here’s a PHP function that detects whether the visitor is on a mobile browser, and does so in 220 bytes. The function’s a one-liner, but it does a pretty good job of detecting mobile browsers. Better still, the article does a great job not just explaining how it works, but it also provides a number of great ways to use it.
AppCode’s splash screen.
In my “summer vacation” post, I talked about the tools I’d be using to learn iOS development. One of them is the obvious choice: XCode, the Apple IDE, and the standard tool for developing iPhone and iPad apps. The other is a new tool, RubyMotion, which attempts to simplify iOS development with Ruby as the programming language and Rake as the primary build tool. Each has its pros and cons, and I thought that it would be interesting to learn iOS development through these two different tools and their different approaches.
James Kovacs, Tech Evangelist for the development tool company JetBrains — the people behind IntelliJ IDEA, RubyMine and ReSharper (quite possibly the most-loved Visual Studio add-on) — read my post and kindly offered me a free licence for AppCode, their IDE for MacOS and iOS development with Objective-C. In his email, he wrote:
No strings attached. Develop the next Angry Birds with it and make your millions. Wax poetic about it on your blog. Or bitch and complain about a missing killer feature. Or ignore it entirely and use Xcode exclusively. It’s really up to you.
Thank you, James! Consider AppCode added to my set of tools that I’ll be using while learning iOS development.
AppCode’s “Quick Start” screen. Click to see it at full size.
Having spent three years in the .NET world, I’ve become acquainted with Visual Studio. It’s one of the few Microsoft products that even the most ardent Microsoft-basher will say, often through gritted teeth, beats out all the others in its field. I agree; it’s an excellent IDE, and along with the underappreciated Windows Live Writer blog editing tool, is one of those precious few Microsoft tools that is consistently a pleasure to use.
Nice as Visual Studio is, it’s made even nicer by ReSharper, which adds a whole raft of utility features to Visual Studio. It takes so much drudgery out of coding that I know a number of developers who refuse to use Visual Studio without it (and a handful of purists who disdain those who use it, saying that they’re not really coding anymore). I’ve noodled a little bit with ReSharper, and liked what I saw. At the very least, it gives me some confidence that AppCode, coming from the same vendor, might have something going for it.
AppCode’s “Create Project” window.
XCode doesn’t get the same love that Visual Studio does. You’ll find many MacOS and iOS developers who like it enough and who’ll point out that it’s improved greatly over the past little while, but even the die-hard fans will say that it’s pretty clunky in places. That’s part of the appeal of alternative tools like RubyMotion, and I was curious to see how AppCode stacks up.
AppCode’s editor window. Click to see it at full size.
A little searching took me to The Code Sheriff, Yoni Tsafir’s blog, and an article in which he compared XCode to AppCode in a number of categories. AppCode wins in a number of categories, especially in those where you are doing a lot of straight-up coding: making quick fixes, refactoring, code completion and generation, keyboard shortcuts and code inspection. In other words, the sort of stuff with which ReSharper juices up Visual Studio.
AppCode doesn’t have an interface-building tool like Interface Builder, which is no longer its own app; it’s now part of XCode. I’m going to experiment with building apps with XCode alone along with taking a hybrid approach and bouncing between XCode and AppCode. That’s not all that different from bouncing between Visual Studio for coding and Expression Blend for UI, something which I did regularly when I was the Windows Phone evangelist.
So now it’s XCode, AppCode and RubyMotion. Thanks, James and JetBrains!